RIO DE JANEIRO — Several weeks after publishing explosive reports about a key member of Brazil’s far-right government, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald was called before a congressional committee to face hostile questions.
Who
should be judged, convicted and in prison is the journalist!” shouted
congresswoman Katia Sastre, an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro.
And by
some accounts that wasn’t an empty threat: A conservative website reported that
federal police had requested that financial regulators investigate Greenwald’s
finances. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and his Brazilian husband also
say they have been receiving detailed death threats, calls for his deportation
and homophobic comments in an increasingly hostile political environment.
Greenwald,
an attorney-turned-journalist who has long been a free-speech advocate, has
found himself at the center of the first major test of press freedom under
Bolsonaro, who took office on Jan. 1 and has openly expressed nostalgia for
Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship — a period when newspapers were
censored and some journalists tortured.
“It’s a
very concerning moment for press freedom in Brazil, especially those covering
something so divisive as politics. We’ve seen an administration that vocally
criticizes journalists with an open anti-press rhetoric,” said Natalie
Southwick, the Central and South American program coordinator for the Committee
to Protect Journalists.
Greenwald’s
The Intercept news website last month published text messages purportedly
showing then-judge and now Justice Minister Sergio Moro had improperly advised
prosecutors in the corruption trial that jailed former President Luiz Inacio
Lula da Silva.
The
Intercept also alleged political bias by Moro and prosecutors in a sweeping
corruption investigation that brought down many of the country’s business and
political elite and turned Moro into a hero to many. The website said it got
the leaked messages from an anonymous source and that it has “vast archive” of
information it has not released.
Moro has
dismissed its reports as sensationalist and said a “criminal group” was aiming
to invalidate convictions handed down when he was a crusading anti-corruption
judge. He later tweeted that The Intercept was “a site aligned with criminal
hackers.”
The
reports infuriated Bolsonaro’s backers.
During
the June 25 hearing at the chamber’s Human Rights and Minorities Commission,
lawmaker Carla Zambelli told Greenwald: “If you don’t prove this information,
it is fake and you’re a liar. If it’s true, then you’re a criminal because you
hacked someone’s phone.”
Greenwald
responded: “The government’s party evidently has a lot of confusion about the
journalism we did.”
Bolsonaro
has repeatedly lashed out at the news media as untruthful, biased toward the
left and for publishing “fake news,” though he has sometimes said he believes
in a free press.
When the
Supreme Court tried to censor a critical story about one of its justices,
Bolsonaro conceded to reporters, “It’s better to have a press that’s sometimes
flawed than to not have a press at all. ... To the Brazilian press: We’re in
this together.”
A
special target of Bolsonaro’s ire has been the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. He
sent a video message a week before the election saying that if he won, Brazil
would be “without lies, without fake news and without the Folha de S.Paulo.”
He has
also referred to Globo, Brazil’s largest media company, as “the enemy” in
WhatsApp messages that were leaked to the press.
As for
The Intercept’s reporting, Bolsonaro has defended his justice minister, saying
what Moro did for Brazil as an anti-corruption judge was “priceless.”
“We
don’t know ... how far they’re willing to go to fulfill this authoritarian
vision that Bolsonaro has spent the last 30 years advocating,” Greenwald told
The Associated Press, referring the president’s record in congress.
“They
were elected based on a promise to change Brazil in multiple ways, including
eroding core freedoms that a democracy requires in order to survive — and one
of those is a free press,” said Greenwald.
While
provincial journalists sometimes face grave dangers in Brazil — two owners of
local media outlets were recently shot and killed in a coastal town outside Rio
de Janeiro — the federal government in recent decades has rarely tried to
stifle reporters. One exception was when then-President da Silva briefly tried
to deport New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter in 2004 after a report that
suggested he drank heavily.
Greenwald,
who lives in Rio de Janeiro, is now accompanied by private security guards and
says he and other staff at The Intercept have received sophisticated, detailed
death threats that sometimes include private personal information.
Being
the center of controversy is nothing new for Greenwald, who was part of a team
at The Guardian newspaper that won a Pulitzer for reports about government
surveillance programs based on classified documents disclosed by Edward
Snowden.
At
recent nationwide demonstrations, backers of Bolsonaro and Moro repeatedly
denounced Greenwald — often by focusing on his sexuality and his husband,
leftist Brazilian congressman David Miranda. Bolsonaro himself has famously
said that he would rather have a dead son than a gay son.
“GlennGreenwald,
get out of Brazil! You are disgusting,” read one sign. An online campaign with
the hashtag #DeportGlennGreenwald was popular on Brazilian Twitter.
Pro-Bolsonaro
members of Brazil’s congress have called for Greenwald’s imprisonment and
deportation.
“I’m a
good villain for this right-wing campaign,” Greenwald said. “I’m not a
Brazilian citizen and therefore can be called a foreigner. I’m also a gay man
in a country where anti-gay has become an important part of the political
climate, and my husband is member of the socialist party ... so it kind of
checks off every box.”
When the
website O Antagonista reported that police were asking financial regulators to
investigate Greenwald’s finances, a Brazilian court ordered the regulators and
the ministry that oversees them to clarify. The official responses left unclear
whether there was an investigation.
Southwick
said such a probe would be “an escalation of the attempts to delegitimize and
undermine the Brazilian press.”
“At the
very least it’s designed to intimidate, to create climate of tension and fear
so that not just me and the journalists I’m working with, but all journalists
think that if they report on powerful political officials they can be targeted
by law enforcement and suffer retribution,” Greenwald said.
Ivana
Bentes, a communications professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,
said the Bolsonaro camp is zeroing in on Greenwald, trying to put him into “the
gallery of public enemies of Bolsonaro. They’re treating him as a political
enemy when he is a journalist, which is very serious. They want to criminalize
a journalistic investigation.”
Greenwald
says he’s not sure when he’ll feel safe to go out in public in Brazil without
security guards, if ever.
“Bolsonaro
ran against the media, he talked about the Brazilian media as being agents of
communism,” he said. “I think they see this as a very important test case to
create a precedent and environment and climate that sends a strong signal that
whoever opposes them through journalism or activism will suffer serious
consequences.”